Honour Among Fiends - Dylan Owen Read online

  A bolt-round rebounded off Scaevolla's chest guard with a bang. The world slipped back into motion, and the wild charge of Scaevolla's warriors met the stoic wall of yellow power armour. Surgit rejoiced. 'At last! A foe worthy of my wrath!'

  With a juddering retort, the heavy bolter atop the crippled Land Raider came to life as Icaris, who had manoeuvred himself to the gun-turret, pinned down reinforcements trying to enter the fight.

  'Dreadnought!' Icaris's heavy bolter shells pattered uselessly against the walker striding powerfully towards the combat, its crushing claws poised to strike.

  Scaevolla stepped in front of the war-hulk, sword pointed in challenge. For how long had the withered corpse inside this walking coffin been compelled to cheat death?

  'By the four gods,' shouted Scaevolla, 'I will end your misery.'

  The Dreadnought, liveried in the heraldry of the Imperial Fists, overshadowed Scaevolla, but the prayer scrolls and relic bones decorating the walker's hulk would be no ward against his runesword, which could penetrate any earthly metal.

  A stray mortar exploded between them.

  White light consumed Scaevolla's vision, then darkness. He was flying. He felt no pain. He panicked. It was not yet time to die! Scaevolla had chosen the manner of his death, and it was not this way.

  Scaevolla landed with a crash and fought for breath. His vision cleared to reveal the Dreadnought, unscratched by the explosion, looming over him, fists crackling with energy. The fingers of Scaevolla's outstretched left hand brushed the hilt of his runesword.

  With a bestial snarl, a giant lurched from the wreckage of the Land Raider. Opus, his head in tatters, pounded the Dreadnought's hull with tactical artillery from his autocannon.

  Scaevolla's grip folded around the handle of his sword and he lunged at the reeling Dreadnought, its armour scorching where the glowing runesword penetrated. Scaevolla slid the blade out and leapt back. The Dreadnought's oculus flashed green then faded to black, and the metal behemoth crashed forward.

  Scaevolla raised his blade in salute. Something ancient had just perished. Scaevolla swallowed his envy.

  The warriors of the Black Legion had decimated the line of Imperial Fists, though a few persevered despite severed limbs and mortal wounds. One Space Marine lay prone, his legs a crimson ruin, loosing shots from his bolt pistol until silenced by Icaris's stamping boot. Another, his helmet cloven, his eyes dashed from his face, fought blind, almost decapitating Larsus with his blade until finished by the lieutenant's chainsword.

  Surgit ran up to the wrecked Dreadnought, shaking his fist in Scaevolla's face. 'Whoreson! That should have been mine!'

  Larsus pushed Surgit aside. 'Scaevolla, we have to go. Lord H'raxor's army has broken through.'

  The gateway was choked with masked mutants fighting each other to be first through the breach. The defenders in the bastions concentrated their fire on the horde, but for every abomination they felled, two more stepped over the corpse. Behind the seething, dying mass, scarlet-armoured berserk warriors wearing rictus helms chopped through the scum with chainswords, chanting paeans to their bloody god.

  Scaevolla's squad stood in a wide bailey that stretched between the defensive wall and the soaring buildings of the city. From the right clanked a wall of battle tanks to plug the breach. From the left marched lines of gas-masked troopers. Ahead, across the bailey, barely discernable through the fog, yawned the entrance to a manufactorum, the heights of the complex disappearing into red clouds. There was only one way forward before the jaws of flesh and metal closed.

  'Follow me, men!' Scaevolla sprinted through the obscuring mist for the huge doors.

  The manufactorum was a cathedral of industry. Furnaces burned - altars of hungry flames - and huge vats steamed stinking vapours like sacred censers. Machinery hissed, impatient to be reanimated, and ducts and gantries spiralled up into echoing blackness. Holed by a single melta charge, the doors had proved no obstacle, and neither had the desultory force of factory guards; the innards of forty men decorated the floor.

  Surgit spat at the corpses. 'We ran from an army to face mere factotums.'

  'We did not run, brother,' retorted Larsus. 'We are on the hunt, remember. The chaff outside is not worth our while.'

  'Calm,' snapped Scaevolla, and Surgit and Larsus backed away from each other. 'How is Manex?'

  'Fit to shatter more skulls.' Manex had been dragged to safety by Opus. His armour was pitted with holes and half his face was fleshy pulp. 'I've suffered worse.'

  'Ferox?'

  Larsus shrugged. 'He'll find us when he's had his fill.'

  'Sharn, Icaris, ready for battle?'

  Sharn bowed, then returned to caressing the white flames of a nearby kiln. Icaris had sunk to his knees, cradling the severed head of a factory-drudge.

  'Why do they fight us? We show them our might, yet they refuse to follow our path. We evangelise with sword and fire, but to what end? They perish in their millions for their faith in a dead God-Emperor. We offer the secret knowledge of the stars, yet they prefer to die ignorant. Why, my captain?' Icaris's cheeks were streaked with bloody tears.

  Scaevolla softly cupped his battle-brother's chin with his armoured glove. The scars on the young face were testament to his many victories.

  'The gods demand sacrifice, boy. We are the reapers who sate their eternal hunger. These men are mere animals, fit only for the holy pyre; don't weep for the fate of the weak.'

  'But I must, captain. I will weep until the entire universe bends its knee to the gods.'

  Scaevolla admired Icaris's devotion, but said nothing more. Let him enjoy the lie. Once Scaevolla too had believed it was his vocation to shatter the shackles of order that chained the galaxy, but he knew from bitter experience that the gods demanded war only for the sake of petty entertainment. Lord H'raxor fought in vain to win glory, for when the gods tired of him, he would be cast down and forgotten. Perhaps Horus's rebellion, too, had been nothing more than a brief diversion for the gods. Perhaps, at the brink of victory, it had delighted them to see their servant fall and watch his armies collapse into animosity. It was for their amusement that Scaevolla scoured the galaxy on an unending blood-hunt.

  As he contemplated the will of his divine masters, unwelcome memories invaded his mind…

  …Scaevolla cradled the dying Space Marine, whose yellow power armour was spattered with the filth of battle. Scaevolla's pale armour was similarly grimed. The surrounding storm of war felt ten thousand years away. Scaevolla looked down at his battle-brother's face: a patrician's nose, a powerful chin, the well-defined skull of a noble warrior, defiant even at the approach of death. Silver eyes dimmed as the life drained away, their glassy stare haunting Scaevolla.

  'Aleph, my friend, you could have saved yourself!' Scaevolla choked on the words. 'Why did you follow the lies of the False Emperor? Your liege-lord is Horus. You know it, brother. Say it!'

  Life beat weakly within the Space Marine, but Aleph's lips did not move. The silence stoked Scaevolla's anger.

  'Damn you, Aleph! We swore to conquer galaxies together, unstoppable, our crusade unending. Remember how we cleansed the Haruspex of Crore? How we defended the monastery of Satrapos alone against the ork hordes of the Starbiter?'

  During the Great Crusades, when Scaevolla's Legion had been called the Lunar Wolves, the Imperial Fists had fought alongside them in many battles. It was common lore that Horus, primarch of the Lunar Wolves, had, as a mark of respect, joked that a war between his Legion and the Imperial Fists would last for eternity.

  At the battle of Thrael Falls on Cestus II, Scaevolla had rescued Captain Aleph of the Imperial Fists from the anak, the planet's monstrous aboriginals. The two Space Marines bonded in friendship and fought together in many battles when the paths of their Legions crossed. But when Horus declared his true colours, Scaevolla failed to convince his friend that the road to glory lay with the Warmaster. The rebellion parted them and they would not meet again until the siege of the Emperor's p
alace on Terra, when the Sons of Horns assaulted the Eternity Gate, guarded by the Imperial Fists. Across the carnage of the battlefield, Scaevolla had sought out his former battle-brother. They had fought, and Aleph had fallen, pierced by Scaevolla's sword.

  Scaevolla remembered his final words to the dying Space Marine. 'All the glory we fought for, my brother, gone to dust.'

  It was only then that Aleph's lips moved. 'It was not our glory, brother,' he spat out the word with a phlegm of blood. 'The glory was the Emperor's.'

  Scaevolla sneered. 'Your Emperor fights to defend dishonourable men, weaklings, slaves, who cower while we, men of virtue, spill our sacred blood on their behalf. Your Emperor could have been a god, and we his angels, but instead he chose servitude to protect his bleating flock.' Urgency touched Scaevolla's words. 'Look into your heart. You know I am right.'

  Aleph shook his head.

  Hot tears coursed Scaevolla's cheeks. 'I offer you freedom, brother, and you choose death.'

  A hundred wounds Scaevolla had suffered, but none had bitten as deep as this. Aleph had rebuked the Warmaster, and had forced Scaevolla's hand to fratricide. Aleph had betrayed his battle-brother.

  'Fool!' snarled Scaevolla. 'I rescued you. You owe me your life. Listen to me. I can save you again: disown the false Emperor and join me.'

  Aleph chuckled hoarsely. 'Had the Emperor granted me foresight, I would have preferred to have been torn alive by the anak than rescued by the whelp of an insane blackguard.'

  Rage conquered Scaevolla. His bitter agony turned to anger, sweet to taste.

  'You dare mock the Warmaster? I swear, with the four gods as my witness, I shall avenge your insults a thousandfold.'

  Laughter echoed madly in Scaevolla's head.

  'I shall hunt down and kill your progeny, to the end of time. Your sons will suffer by my blade for your devotion to your weakling Emperor.'

  Scaevolla tore Aleph's armour from his chest and dug deep into the flesh. With a sickening squelch, he removed a gland from the mess, his armoured gloves wet and red. As the light in Aleph's eyes vanished, Scaevolla taunted him with the bloody trophy. 'I shall replay this moment of victory over you again and again.'

  With reverence, he nestled the organ in Aleph's dead hands. The progenoid gland contained the gene-seed necessary to cultivate Aleph's successor. Apothecaries scoured the battlefield under fire, collecting the precious material. When they recovered Aleph's progenoid gland, his essence would live on in a new recruit implanted with his gene-seed. Scaevolla would pursue each of Aleph's genetic heirs and make them suffer the same fate as their progenitor. In invoking the four gods, he had bound himself to this oath.

  Scaevolla stood and addressed the corpse. 'I shall build a monument to the gods you spurned with the skulls of your descendants. Yours shall be the foundation stone.'

  With a swift swipe of his blade he decapitated his former battle-brother. As he stooped to pick up the fallen head, Larsus appeared, stumbling on the wreckage of the battlefield, panic on his bloodied face. Scaevolla paled as he heard his words.

  'Captain, all hope is lost. The Warmaster is dead! We must go!'

  'What did you say?'

  Larsus repeated himself, louder…

  …The past faded. Scaevolla gathered his wits back to the present. Larsus was shaking his shoulder.

  'Captain, we must go. H'raxor's army has broken the outer defences.'

  Outside, the triumphant battle cries of the invading horde were drowning out the defenders' screams. Scaevolla paused, inhaling deeply. His quarry was close. His senses were drawn to the factory's heights.

  'We go up.'

  * * *

  Scaevolla watched the trooper pirouette towards a gaping vat far below and vanish with a splash into the volcanic brew, the last of those who had engaged his squad as they clambered up ladders and along gantries to the higher levels of the factory, led by their leader's instinct.

  The squad stood before a set of sturdy doors. Scaevolla could almost taste his quarry's presence beyond them. Quietly, he took Larsus to one side. 'Lieutenant, whatever happens, do not intervene to save me. If I should fall, it is the will of the gods. Bear my head to Sebaket and top the altar with my skull as a mark of my failure.'

  Larsus looked stunned. 'What do you mean, captain? There is no soul in this galaxy who could best you.'

  Scaevolla turned away from his lieutenant. He pointed at the doors. 'Opus?'

  The bull ran at the doors and shouldered them open. Daylight spilled from the breach. Scaevolla followed, the rest of his men close behind.

  Outside was a wide plaza, open to the gusting wind, with a view across the mist-wreathed killing fields far below. Low clouds, an angry red, obscured the sky. A platoon of Imperial Fists ranged across the plaza. The tallest was cloaked in sweeping blue, crowned with the golden laurels of an officer. An ornate sword hissed with energy in his hands.

  Scaevolla thrilled. Aleph's features were etched on Captain Demetros's noble face. He barked his orders. 'The captain is mine. Destroy the others.'

  The screech of bolters greeted the warriors' charge, their black armour soaking up the deadly hail. Scaevolla watched his squad advance.

  'Farewell,' he whispered sadly, then muttered a pledge to the gods. 'Now it's time to end your sport. I will lay no more skulls before your altar.'

  Scaevolla walked forward, singling out the captain with his runesword. Five hundred times he had re-enacted this scene. Five hundred times he had vanquished his silver-eyed opponent, heir of Aleph, and removed his head as a trophy. His rage had been satisfied long ago. He'd had to endure the pain of murdering his comrade over and over again, but he could endure it no longer.

  Scaevolla circled, a black wolf stalking its prey. His rival adopted a duelling posture, power sword balanced to parry or bite. As he closed, Scaevolla saw Demetros's silver eyes narrow with faint recognition. That silver stare pinned Scaevolla's gaze, transporting him to another time, another place…

  …The sounds of battle roared, explosions and gunfire and the screams of the dying. The ground shuddered to the tread of a Titan's foot, scattering squads of Imperial Fists before it. The magnificent Eternity Gate, glowering over the battlefield, shook to the fiery kiss of a hundred missiles. A gunship screeched overhead, spitting death, and a dozen advancing pale-armoured Sons of Horus fell in a shower of flame. Mud from the explosions spattered Scaevolla's pale armour, but he did not flinch. The cacophony of battle was a mere murmur to him as he circled his opponent, the surrounding blur of violence an illusion.

  'Brother Scaevolla.' Scaevolla's silver-eyed adversary broke the silence. 'I have missed you.'

  'And I you, Brother Aleph.' Scaevolla smiled ruefully. 'Surrender your sword. You've laid low many of the Warmaster's servants but I will vouch for you before him. He will forgive.'

  'Why should I give my heart to a traitor?' spat Aleph. His eyes steeled. 'His madness has destroyed everything the Emperor has fought for. Your Warmaster has stolen your reason, Scaevolla. You may live your lie for ten millennia, but your heart will weary of your lusts, and you'll be left an empty husk.' Aleph breathed deeply, his features pulled with sorrow. 'Let me end it here, my friend. On the point of my blade. I cannot save you from your past, but I can save you from the future.'

  Their eyes continued to lock.

  Aleph nodded slowly. 'So be it. We fight…'

  …Scaevolla was jolted back into the present as Demetros's blade sprang from nowhere. He blocked with a rapid parry, his runesword sparking as it slid down his rival's power weapon. With a flick of his blade, Demetros tried to disarm him, but Scaevolla was too nimble and returned with a counter-blow. Demetros inclined his head slightly, and the runesword's sweep skimmed his cheek.

  A hideous ululation broke the duellist's concentration. Fury burst from the plaza doors, clad in baroque armour slick with gore. Odes to the Blood God howled from rictus battle-helms as the berserkers fell on the Imperial Fists, chainaxes chopping. One of the crazed attack
ers sliced apart a Space Marine, but was in turn disembowelled by Surgit, whose kill he had stolen. Soon the plaza was a confused melee: black, yellow and crimson power armour battling each other.

  Five berserkers converged on Captain Demetros.

  'No!' screamed Scaevolla, decapitating one with a swing of his blade.

  The headless corpse tottered forward, flailing past the startled Space Marine. Scaevolla turned to engage two of the surviving berserkers. Demetros was forced to defend against the other pair. Together they stood almost side by side, blocking every frenzied attack. Though their assailants' blows were everywhere, their defences blurred in reply. A chainaxe buzzed past Demetros's head, who ducked and rammed his blade deep into its wielder's chest. Another berserker lunged enthusiastically at Scaevolla, who cut his legs from under him, the severed stumps smoking where the runesword had bitten.

  With a crunch, a chainaxe penetrated Demetros's shoulder guard. He shrugged off the wound, but tottered back, unbalanced. Howling, the devotee of the Blood God raised his weapon to deal the death blow, but the axe stopped centimetres from Demetros's skull, met by Scaevolla's sword. Scaevolla raked his blade down the weapon's shaft, slicing through its guard and ruining the fingers clutching the hilt, before decapitating its wielder with a whirling blow. Demetros rolled to a kneeling position to gut the final attacker. Scaevolla spun to face the Imperial Fist, who rose to his feet, the berserker's corpse slipping from his blade.

  Scaevolla gave a slight bow. 'Just like old times.'

  Demetros frowned. 'I have seen you fight before.'

  'We have never met,' Scaevolla smiled slyly. 'But I have spilled your blood many, many times.'